


Season’s Greetings from the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane

by damnslippyplanet



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alana Is So Fucking Done, Alana POV, BSHCI, Christmas, Drunk Texting, F/F, Hannibal is Hannibal, Jack Is So Fucking Done, Mid-Late Season 3, Post-Finale, The Hannigram is background, Will is a Mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-14
Updated: 2015-12-14
Packaged: 2018-05-06 14:33:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5420705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damnslippyplanet/pseuds/damnslippyplanet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three Christmases where Hannibal Lecter is behind bars, and one where he isn't: A story about Alana Verger-Bloom being 100% done with everything, forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Season’s Greetings from the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane

_The First Christmas_

The first Christmas Hannibal Lecter spends in the care and safekeeping of the BSHCI, his ultimate fate hasn’t been decided yet. There’s still legal wrangling going on, motions being filed, debate over whether the man is insane or sanely evil or whether there’s even the slightest chance he’s not guilty at all.

Hannibal comes to court when circumstances require it and sits there calmly, as well-put-together as anyone can get in his situation, short hair and sunlight-starved skin, and Alana understands why the debate rages on. She really does. If anyone in the world understands how easy it is to look at the man and fail to see the monster, it’s her.

And yet as she sits there to give her testimony, all she sees is a monster in a suit and she can’t remember what it felt like to see anything else. Hannibal doesn’t often bother to look at her, but when he does, his eyes are fathomless. She wonders how she could ever have seen herself reflected in them, all those sleepy mornings when they woke up tangled together. All she sees now is the endless dark of a moonless, starless night. All she sees now is her death, and Margot’s death, sitting calmly and waiting for its opportunity. 

Probably that would have been enough to decide Alana’s next move for her. But if not, she would have made the decision when the Christmas card arrived.

God only knows where Hannibal got access to greeting cards from prison. He’s allowed his correspondence and Alana understands there’s quite a lot of it - hate mail, fan mail, marriage proposals, book deal offers, professional correspondence - but she can’t imagine he gets to pick out greeting cards.

She stares at the card with a grimace. It’s pleasant enough. Overly pleasant. Aggressively pleasant. A cheerful Christmas tree, trimmed gaudily, and a small child underneath opening a present. Inside, that neat handwriting, still tidy despite the limitations of a felt-tip pen: “Best regards to you and your family, Alana. I hope to see you in the new year. Merry Christmas, from H. Lecter.”

She presses her hand reflexively to her slightly-curved stomach, still subtle enough to be hidden beneath carefully chosen clothes, and wonders whether a man who can smell cancer, gunpowder, and god knows what else, can smell an early pregnancy from across a packed courtroom. Especially if it’s someone whose regular scent he already knows well. She wonders if this is a general threat or a very specific one, and she wonders if it really matters.

Either way, it makes up her mind for her. She tells Margot that night that she’s decided to go ahead and accept the directorship of the institution. She’s afraid she may never sleep at night again if anyone else is holding the ring of keys that keeps Hannibal prisoner. No one else wants him buried far from sunlight as badly as she does. 

They take an impromptu Christmas vacation to St. Barts, on the theory that between the baby and Alana’s new job, it may be a long time before they get away again, just the two of them. Verger money buys privacy and luxury, and Alana spends long hours soaking up the sun, but somehow she always feels cold. Almost always. Margot holds and loves and warms her, but she won’t be able to take Margot with her down into the secure cells of the institution. She’ll have to leave Margot behind when she goes to work, but she’ll have to bring their child. She tries not to think about taking their unborn child into that place, cradled in the broken and mended and tenuous safety of her body.

They fly back after the new year and she starts her new job the following week. She sends Will a short message letting him know about her new role, letting him know that she’s taking every safety precaution she can think of. She doesn’t mention the baby. She wishes him a happy new year.

Will doesn’t write back but then she didn’t expect him to. She’d seen a few photos of him on his way to and from the courthouse to testify at Hannibal’s trial. He looked like something haunted and broken and exhausted, some wild animal injured and run to ground and just waiting for the coup de grâce. She wondered what Will had seen in Hannibal’s eyes in that courtroom, and if he sleeps better or worse knowing that Hannibal is under her care.

She suspects he’s gone semi-feral out there in the woods, with his dogs and his nightmares, but she doesn’t reach out again. Alana’s learned her boundaries at a high cost and she patrols them fiercely now. Margot. The baby. The monster she keeps imprisoned to protect them both. The other criminals whose caretaking needs she accepted along with the keys to Hannibal’s cell, an almost incidental responsibility but one she still feels obliged to carry out well.

Will Graham will have to take care of himself. But she does wonder if he got a Christmas card, too. 

_The Second Christmas_

By the second Christmas, Hannibal’s trial has come and gone and he’s been consigned to Alana’s care permanently, officially insane.

She can barely suppress a sigh and a grimace when a request comes to her, a quite proper one through official channels for inmate communication, for a meeting that could perhaps take place over Christmas Eve dinner. God only knows what the man has in mind. But she’s pretty sure that she still amuses Hannibal, and that an amused Hannibal in captivity is better than a bored one. A bored one might start getting ideas about changing his situation.

She sends back a response, just as politely worded, noting that she has other plans in the evening but will join him for lunch to discuss whatever his concern may be. Then she tries to put every thought of Hannibal aside, to get through the stack of reports on her desk. She suspects she’ll be useless after lunch; keeping herself outwardly unruffled through meetings with Hannibal tends to take everything out of her.

She stops working fifteen minutes before lunch, shoves everything aside on her desk, and calls Margot. They talk about nothing in particular; Morgan’s latest attempt at sitting up unassisted, a business deal Margot is trying to broker while on parental semi-leave that’s driving her batty, the horses, the weather. Alana doesn’t bother Margot with Hannibal’s request for her company; she’ll tell her about it later, over dinner. She just wants Margot’s voice fresh in her mind to take with her into the gloom of the cell.

In the end, it turns out that most of what Hannibal wants is to poke idly at Alana. Subtle, malicious innuendos. Nothing the attendants would necessarily catch; you’d have to have their history. Hannibal has no intention of letting her forget their history. She tries not to think about the man’s damnable memory and what images or memories of her he may replay to pass the time, but it’s difficult at these moments. 

Her fingers itch to slap him but that would just be giving him what he wants. Displays of emotion. Signs that he’s still capable of pulling strings from behind glass. She won’t give him that. If it breaks her entirely, if she leaves this room and falls to her knees sobbing in the hallway the moment the door shuts, if she has nightmares for the next week straight, Alana will not give him the satisfaction of seeing her flinch. She stills her hands and tries not to think of the way those same hands had stroked sounds from thin air in Hannibal’s bedroom, their laughter the night they’d played the theremin together, whether any single moment of what had transpired between them had ever been real. She hates that she still wonders, once in a while, if she was only ever a means to an end.

It’s probably because she’s angry at herself and at Hannibal for the memory that she slips, just a little, just at the end of their calm, pointed, unpleasant lunch together.

He always asks about Will, and she always declines to provide any information. But today he passes an envelope out through his letter tray. Will Graham’s name written across it. Unsealed. She holds it up with a questioning expression and he’s still amused, always damnably amused, as he notes, “A holiday greeting for an old friend. There didn’t seem to be much point in making a production of sealing it. If you hadn’t opened it yourself, Jack would have.”

“You know he’s not going to open this. He’s probably not even going to let Jack give it to him.” She taps the letter against her palm and resists the urge to open it. She probably will, later, but not here. 

“That’s Will’s choice to make. If you and Jack decide to let him make it. Or are you both still protecting him from me?”

That’s where she should have ended it, not let herself get drawn into a discussion about Will Graham. If she’d been just a little less on edge, she would have stopped. Instead, she lets loose the barb she’s been holding back, the one weapon she has that will hurt Hannibal the way she wants him hurt.

“That’s not the right address anymore. He’s moved.” She feels vicious, victorious, as she adds, “He and his _wife_ moved. I’m not even sure they’re back from their honeymoon yet. They’ll have so much to catch up on. Thank-you notes to write. Will might not get around to reading this even if he wants to.”

Hannibal is so still naturally that it’s not immediately apparent when he’s gone utterly and completely motionless. It’s more a feeling than anything visually apparent; a sensation of being in the presence of something inhuman and predatory. Alana’s felt it in this room before, but not lately. She’s feeling it now. He could be a statue, he’s working so hard not to show any response. Which tells her exactly how close to the bone she’s hit, and she’s suddenly, savagely gleeful. For all that she shouldn’t have said it. For all that she’s going to have to let Will know that she let slip a piece of information about his life, that she’s given Hannibal a toehold he shouldn’t have.

After a long frozen moment Hannibal nods, almost invisibly - concession of a game lost, for the moment. His voice is calm and perfectly unruffled as he asks, “Did you and Margot attend?” He doesn’t say “the wedding.” She wonders if maybe he can’t say it.

She’s already given up the information at this point, she can have a little more fun if she’s careful. So she nods. “It was lovely. They seemed very happy.” And they had. It had all been a bit awkward, after she hadn’t seen Will in so long. She suspects Molly was the one driving him to invite some people from his previous life. She suspects Molly is busily shoring up the shakier bits of Will, and doing a pretty good job of it from appearances. Alana wishes them both luck, and does not think about what might have been.

She steps back from the glass, Hannibal’s holiday message to Will in hand, and turns to leave. “I’ll pass this on to Jack for the usual screening. What he does with it from there is up to him. Can’t promise it’ll get to Will. I need to get back to work now, if that was all you needed. Good afternoon, Hannibal.”

He doesn’t return the greeting. She leaves him in the semi-dark, perfectly still and quiet, and she could almost feel sorry for him. Almost. She thinks of Margot and Morgan, and Will and Molly and Walter, and Abigail, and she finds she isn’t really sorry at all.

Before she leaves early for the day, needing to see her wife and child again as soon as possible, she calls Jack to let him know Hannibal’s writing to Will again. He’s only done it a few times, and as far as Alana knows Will has never actually read the messages but Jack always collects them and runs them through analysis and offers Will a copy. She doesn’t know what Jack’s hoping to find. She’s not sure he even knows. Maybe it’s a ritual as much as anything, much like her own keys and locks and guards and rounds - children’s incantations to keep the unknown at bay.

She leaves the letter with her assistant for Jack to pick up, but doesn’t wait to meet with him when he arrives. They don’t talk anymore other than for these business matters, and she needs to get home in time for Christmas Eve dinner.

_The Third Christmas_

By the third winter Hannibal spends in captivity, he’s withdrawn into himself. He still rouses himself sufficiently to play hurtful, spiteful word games with the occasional visitor. He still publishes, although Alana thinks he does it more to irritate Frederick Chilton than from any particular desire to stay relevant in a field in which he will never practice again. But otherwise, he doesn’t speak much. 

Hannibal reads, and draws endless pictures of Florence, Paris, Will Graham, and a shattered teacup whose significance eludes Alana. Frederick gets a glimpse of one of these pictures and attempts to draw Hannibal into agreement with him about the artwork as a representation of Hannibal’s own splintered psyche. Hannibal rouses enough to puncture Frederick’s theory with a few well-chosen jabs and Alana has to feign a coughing fit to hide her laughter. For once, she’s on Hannibal’s side, on that particular day. Frederick’s become unbearable since his book sales took off.

More and more often, though, Hannibal simply lies down on his narrow bed, folds his hands, and goes somewhere inside his memories. Alana wonders if someday he’ll retreat so far into himself he’ll simply never come out again. Catatonia would be an anticlimactic end for Hannibal, but it might mean safety for her family, and so Alana doesn’t do anything in particular to discourage any of this.

He doesn’t try to send any messages to Will this year, or to invite Alana to any meetings to make barely-veiled threats to her family, and she relaxes a little. Not enough to let down her guard, but just enough that maybe this year she will have a Christmas untainted by the endless mess that is Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter.

That’s the plan.

The plan is killed dead in the water when she wakes up on Christmas morning to a string of texts on her phone. She hadn’t even known Will still had her cell phone number. She hasn’t talked to him in months. She’s pretty sure she’d never hear from him at all if it weren’t for Molly occasionally prodding him to keep in touch with his old life. Alana rather wonders if Molly would do that if she knew all that old life had entailed, but that’s Will’s business, not hers.

She decides she’s going to need coffee before she reads the texts. Morgan and Margot are still asleep and she has some precious time to herself. She’d hoped to spend it doing something more Christmassy than reading five late-night texts from Will Graham, but until she actually looks, she can hold on to a vain hope that maybe he’d just wanted to wish their family happy holidays. Very enthusiastically. At three a.m.

She spends a few minutes sipping her coffee quietly, standing up in the kitchen, looking through into the living room where the tree and presents are laid out. She lets herself imagine Morgan’s excitement when they bring him downstairs in an hour or two. She lets herself picture how beautiful Margot will look in her new earrings.

And then she puts all of that aside and turns the phone over.

_1:23 a.m. Is he all right? No contact attempts this year?_

_1:31 a.m. Sorry. Don’t answer that. Molly and Walter went to her parents. I’m alone getting drunk and maudlin. Sorry._

_2:15 a.m. Fuck it. Is he?_

_2:57 a.m. Sorry again. Never mind. Going to sleep now. Don’t answer._

_3:05 a.m. Merry Christmas._

Alana considers writing something back. She could confirm that Hannibal’s all right, for a certain value of “all right” given his circumstances. She could ignore the first four messages and just wish Will a Merry Christmas. Tell him to keep in touch. 

But she thinks again about boundaries, and what she is and isn’t responsible for, and puts the phone on the table just out of reach. Her hands are full with her own life, and anyway when Will wakes up with a hangover he’s probably going to be horrified he sent those messages. He’d probably be grateful if she just never, ever mentions it again. Which she won’t. 

She leaves the phone where it is and goes to turn on the Christmas tree lights, and then she lies on the sofa with Applesauce and watches them twinkle like tiny stars until she hears Margot and Morgan making their way downstairs. 

_The Fourth Christmas_

By the fourth Christmas, the one Hannibal Lecter does not spend in captivity, Alana’s long gone from BSHCI. She’s resigned her post and moved to California (for now; they’re planning another move soon). But she does keep in sporadic touch with Jack to learn how the hunt is progressing. When, or if, it may be safe for them to come home.

Margot’s taken their life on the run surprisingly well. Or maybe not surprisingly; there’s a core of steel in her as solid as Alana’s, if more metaphorical, and maybe it’s one of the reasons they call to each other. She knows, after all, what Hannibal is and is capable of. And she’s perhaps less blinded than Alana by notions about what Will might _not_ be capable of. 

They hold opposing views on exactly what Will and Hannibal are doing together, wherever they are, since the FBI’s pretty sure they didn’t actually die. Margot’s pretty sure it’s all blood and fucking; Alana thinks that whatever is going on between those two, it’s probably a lot weirder and less predictable than that. She thinks she’s probably not entirely capable of understanding whatever it is, and she’s immensely grateful for that.

Jack’s latest call, about a letter addressed to Alana care of Jack’s office, doesn’t do anything to clarify the situation. He sounds like a man who is utterly disgusted with everyone and everything. Alana has more reason than anyone to want Will and Hannibal found, but she thinks Jack just might be more _annoyed_ at the situation than anyone. He’s taken it as a personal affront. 

He seems equally affronted by the piece of paper he’s holding. It’s a copy - the original, presumably, is in a lab somewhere being steamed and fingerprinted and scraped for trace evidence. Jack holds it up with great reluctance so she can see the front of the card first.

She’d been terribly afraid Hannibal was going to have hand-drawn something for her himself and she might have started laughing so hard that it would turn into screaming and she’d never, ever stop. Fortunately it’s a store-bought card, a cheap mass-produced thing they’ll never be able to trace usefully, so she can bite back the laughter. There’s a pig. They sent her and Margot a Christmas card with a pig in a Santa hat.

She rolls her eyes and motions to Jack to go ahead and read it.

“Dear Alana. We apologize for making you our go-between in recent years. It was unforgiveably rude. We’re grateful to you and also grateful that we no longer require your services in that capacity. Please tell Margot all debts are discharged. Our paths won’t be crossing again. We’re otherwise occupied. We wish you the best.”

The writing ends there. Jack notes, “It’s Will’s handwriting but it sounds like Hannibal’s dictation to me. Signatures from both of them.”

“A joint effort, I think. Will would have had to talk him into sending it. Left on his own he’d keep us wondering forever.” Alana doesn’t bother to say that she still will be wondering forever. She doesn’t trust any assurance of safety that Will and Hannibal might ever provide. They’re too mercurial, too unpredictable together.

Apparently there was a small stuffed piglet in with the card. Jack makes some vague apologetic noises about being unable to forward it as it will need to reside in an evidence locker, but Alana waves that away. The last thing in the world Morgan needs is a whimsical gift from those two in his bed at night.

She gets off the call as quickly as possible and considers the message for a while. She knows perfectly well it’s not to be trusted. They won’t return to Baltimore anytime soon, maybe ever.

Soon she needs to finish getting ready to go out and meet Margot and Morgan at the park. But before she goes, Alana does indulges herself briefly in the idea that maybe, just maybe, she’s gotten the last fucking Christmas message she is ever going to get from Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham.

**Author's Note:**

> This appears to be what passes for a Christmas fic in my head. I don't even know. Come play with me over at [Tumblr](http://damnslippyplanet.tumblr.com) if you wish!


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